Even in the age of no limits, a winsome 20-something hockey player from Finland with speed and touch was putting his NHL career on the time clock.

Rookie Teemu Selanne was having dinner with two Winnipeg Jets teammates, forward Thomas Steen and defenseman Fredrik Olausson, and told them of his plans to return to play in Europe. They were properly dubious.

"I told them two, three years and then I go back," Selanne, now 41 and entering the seventh season of his second stint with the Ducks, said the other day in Anaheim. "We make a bet. The guys start laughing, 'You're stupid. You're crazy.' I said, 'What do you mean?'